RE: Upside Down Energy19 Jun 2024 15:32
reasons
you could do that but that requires some joined-up thinking in both government policy and between operators.
in the uk we (the tax-payer) already give a fortune to the off-shore wind farm operators in compensation payments when they have to shut down all or part production capacity. this is because there is excess supply or there is not enough grid capacity to get power from off-shore scotland to the midlands and south east.
these deals were part of the licensing deals to give the developers assurance that there was a market for their offtake. that was reasonable enough in the early days, but the scale of new, and still-to-be-built, capacity will make that cost get really high. hence one reason for the growing, and soon to be both massive and massively difficult, row about the scale of new grid capacity needed in the uk and the planning regulations surrounding that.
putting in electrolyser capacity to ‘soak up’ some of the ‘unwanted’ over-capacity is a reasonable response and would sit alongside increased battery capacity to divide the ‘surplus’ between long/short-term, molecules/electrons storage options.
itm is already part of such a project at the scottish power whitelees wind farm. it is a relatively small 25 mw project that has been stuck in an endless cycle of planning issues for the last 2/3 years. we have no idea when it will be built.
i think implementing such capacity on a much larger scale is sensible but complex. who owns and pays for it? who operates it and is there a guaranteed offtake market for the h2? who decides when and what proportion of the ‘spare’ power goes to batteries or the electrolyser? these are just some of the opening questions. it gets tricky, but is far from insoluble if you have some joined-up thinking, directive political leadership and positive action.
to me, it is at the very least, bizarre that every politician in the country (and most of europe) agrees that productivity increases are critical parts of uk future economic growth. yet here we are shutting capacity down and paying someone to do that. so taxpayers are buying something that they will never get. economists would call it an opportunity cost, but it is also a real cash flow.
the tragedy is the waste. when those shutdowns occur, that is a 100% write-off of that productive time that can never be recovered – there are no 30 or 35-hour days to catch up. hence that energy is never produced and the operational efficiency of the wind farm is reduced. economic efficiency for the operators, not so much because the taxpayers pick up the bill!
can you imagine an auto manufacturer shutting down a production line because the car storage area is full up? of course not – find the constraint and fix the bloody thing. anyone who has ever seen the inside of a production facility knows this.
sorry, a bit of a rant – this issue really ****es me off.
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